Category: Indigenous PSE

What to Look for in Tonight’s Budget

At 4 PM EST, Finance Minister Bill Morneau will rise in the House of Commons to deliver his fourth budget, and the last one before a federal election in the fall.  What can we expect from the budget on the big PSE-files?  Here’s a quick rundown. Transfer Payments: Status quo. Research: My guess is that there are small goodies in this budget, if only to give them an excuse to reprint everything they did last year in this year’s budget

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How Not to Argue About Free Tuition (New Zealand Edition)

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about how Canada needs better data to improve understanding of what various types of intervention – like Alberta’s tuition freeze or Targeted Free Tuition in Ontario and New Brunswick –do in terms of access.  But data is not enough: it’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.  An example from our friends down in New Zealand can perhaps show why. We are coming up on the first anniversary of the implementation of free first-year

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Better Northern Higher Education Strategy

Higher education strategy in the Canadian north is tricky. Challenges include from the huge distances, the tiny populations, and the responsibility to support Indigenous populations with specific cultural, educational and scientific needs.  The fact that the North is divided into three different territories, each with its own college, fractures the system still further.  And then add on to this the fact that every college and territory also wants to hand out degrees as well, and you get a system which is

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Wānangas, Tribal Colleges, and Canadian Indigenous PSE Institutions

A little over a year ago, Ontario brought in legislation to create the country’s first system of Indigenous universities.  In the upcoming federal budget, it seems possible that the Government of Canada may look at ways to finance Indigenous post-secondary education as well.  The question I want to look at today is what model or models of Indigenous higher education Canada might want to borrow from when developing its own system(s). Internationally, there are essentially three models for systems of

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The New Third Pillar

There is a revolution going on in Ontario’s higher education system, but remarkably, very few people have noticed it yet.  Henceforth, Ontario will have not just a college system and a university system, but also a third category of institutions which does not have a name but which, for the moment are called Indigenous Institutes but which may well soon be called Indigenous Universities. Trust me, this is big. There have been “indigenous institutes” for nearly 35 years ago in Ontario

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